10TH APRIL 2025

RECORD 24

HAVE YOU HEARD OF DINARA?

Being included in the New East programme at Barbican in 2018 among just 5 or so films that had to represent pioneering (and less known) Russian cinema, basing off its monumental Soviet heritage (let's decide together here that by Russian I mean a geographical country only and not its bigger meaning). Alongside the generational musts as Balabanov's Brother (1997) that represented realities of St. Petersburg of the 90s and the scandalous theatre-play-turned-film The Student (2016). This programme also screened Boys (1983), a feature film directed by Dinara Asanova, that portrays the 80s in Soviet Russia and a social drama following a number of troubled boys that instead of a juvenile detention centre have been given a second chance for a normal life under the leadership of Pavel Vasiliyevich (a head of the summer camp that these boys were sent off to). Boys (1983) is one of the last films in Asanova's unpredictably short career and appears as the brightest for foreign critics. The film director masterfully switches between the fictional story and some documentary footage. No wonder this film was the choice for the programme, focusing as it seemed on boyhood in Russia.



Her filmmaking journey started here (well, almost). As many contemporaries of her generation that stayed in history, Dinara moved to Moscow to study at Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography; and as she pointed out, her main influences became her master there, a Soviet film director Mikhail Romm (interesting fact! a trained sculptor from the legendary non-existent now art school VKhUTEMAS in Moscow) and a fellow-graduate Georgian legend Otar Ioseliani, who was a part of the Thaw generation of artists and filmmakers in the USSR. Her films notably address very Soviet qualities with their roots in Soviet social realism (hence I'd presume is the link to Romm) such as civil consciousness and humanism but in the new realities of the 80s and predominantly in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). Aimed to tell stories about real people, and not the Soviet tropes (as before), the films she directed were very in demand with teenagers inundating the director with their letters seeking answers on how she knew their lives so well and how they could sign up for her film class. A remark referencing the outnumbered adults in her films, who are siding with and guiding the main characters in the stories she adapted to screen, who were teachers and educators. Funnily, Asanova said herself that her parents had hopes for her to become an educator, when she was very firm and determined since a young age to be involved in filmmaking, which she started acting on as soon as she could by persuading the film studio in her native Kyrgyzstan to hire her (spoiler! they did).

Her first feature film, Woodpeckers Don't Get Headaches (1974), was released a few years after her graduation and by a Leningrad-based film studio (which was Lenfilm). Since her final year short Rudolfio (1969) was very provocative, although a very sincere story based on writings of a Siberian writer Valentin Rasputin, Mosfilm wouldn't hire her, even despite receiving a distinction for her directing degree and being marked by one of the most influential and highly awarded art workers Mikhail Romm. The early 70s signified a lack of films on teenagers, a sector that was in crisis in some ways, with the older films not being relevant anymore to the current youngsters and those that were released represented only a perfect version that society was expecting young people to be. Asanova was keen on diving into the complexities of what adolescence could be and exploring outsiders that the teenagers were to the general community on their terms. So the script of Woodpeckers Don't Get Headaches (1974) that the studio proposed for her to direct really resonated with Dinara in its new and honestly raw ways of depicting young people.



Breaking the boundaries of authenticity and insisting on filmmaking being a collaborative process, Asanova let the teen actors improvise and figure their words by setting the situations from the script, rather than making them recite the lines. Being read the whole script just once and encouraged to speak their words when on set, the young actors came up with lines that were pretty much as they were in the script by Yuri Klepikov, which was a surprising discovery for the film crew. As a novelty and an extension of the collective attempt creating an authentic world, the director of cinematography Dmitri Dolinin suggested capturing (what now is) St. Petersburg in a different way. It is even hard to see the former Imperial capital in there, with the lack of the glorious picture-perfect postcard frames and locations. Rather trying to chase the mood of the ever-changing state with endless roads, railways and the city white noise, depicting the crossroads that the characters are at. Nevertheless, Woodpeckers Don't Get Headaches (1974) has a very warm feel, which is transmitted in the eyes of the teacher Tatyana Petrovna (played by Ekaterina Vasilyeva) and already has some nostalgic feel to the housing block of the main character Seva (a.k.a Mukha, translated as fly in Russian). Almost stating that childhood is being left behind for him, turning it into a memory like a lost-and-found film photograph. For this, Dinara Asanova confessed her personal nostalgic feelings over her childhood community house yard in Frunze (now Bishkek), where she was involved in many theatrical and community-related initiatives.







The film was a huge success and, at last, Asanova found home and creative allies at Lenfilm. Her second feature was a more layered story having a few focal points. A group of senior classmates, who are misfits to society as not being children nor yet adults, their literature teacher, who appears as a very progressive and idealistic misfit in different ways (along with the fact that she is a divorcee) and a new school principal, an army officer, who tries to get to the ultimate fair judgement. The Key That Should Not Be Handed On (1976) deals with complex and clearly generational conflicts, hearing out all the parties, including the rest of the teachers and parents, observing, studying them and letting these people take as much screen time as they need. As a filmmaker who existed on the borderline of the passing Thaw and the Stagnation Era, Dinara also captured the heroes of the time and masters of their arts, almost slipping again into the documentary field capturing the time she was witnessing. For instance, with casting Soviet poet Bulat Okudzhava in this film.



Dinara had a heart attack in her early 20s that almost took her life when she was a film student. Since then, with having 9 films completed, she was pointed out as rushing to live and stating that there was no time for pretence, generously learning and accepting every film she worked on as a growing experience and working as hard as she could for every new challenge. Dinara Asanova passed away when filming in Murmansk in 1985 from a heart attack. She was 42, was married to an artist and had a son. She was awarded many awards, admiration and care of her contemporaries on both sides of the screen, but as with many, after the Soviet Union collapse and the economic crisis, being lost for the new generations yet to discover. Although, I can’t avoid mentioning a roll of a glamorous and attention-capturing exhibitions held in Russia across 2023 and 2024 enlightening on the filmography and work of Dinara Asanova (with a number of fashion publications writing promotional texts on this there), there is a hope for a contemporary generations to know non-capital (sometimes referred to as Leningrad school) filmmakers from the past. But there also isn’t, with some recent worrying news of Lenfilm fearing bankruptcy.



Interestingly, Dinara Asanova wrote fairytales addressed primarily at first feelings and experiences (as well as fears) mixing Turkic mythological notions (as Temir-khan, temir or timer, translates as iron in many Turkic languages) and more defined relatable contemporary (to a certain extent) characters. In her diaries, she mentioned a probability that her passion for this type of storytelling was always with her and that it came from her Tatar grandmother. Similarly, Asanova had always pointed out that she wasn't attempting to make films just for a specific audience as her goal and interest was in depicting personality and characters more than their class or subculture, appealing to bigger and simpler notions of humanism as a way to have the audience's trust to bring up important topics.

FILMS METIONED:
BROTHER (1997) DIR. BY ALEKSEI BALABANOV
THE STUDENT (2016) DIR. BY KIRILL SEREBRENNIKOV
BOYS (1983) DIR. BY DINARA ASANOVA
WOODPECKERS DON’T GET HEADACHES (1974) DIR. BY DINARA ASANOVA
THE KEYS THAT SHOULD NOT BE HANDED ON (1975) DIR. BY DINARA ASANOVA